[Discourse is by] far the best online forum platform in the industry. It may be a little pricey for people looking for a cheap option for their hobby forum, but for any type of business that relies on a forum, the pricing is more than fair.
The user friendly android and IOS applications are one of the best features of Zoho Desk although if you are expecting a Desktop application then you will be disappointed and will have to access it from your browser which can be slow sometimes, depending on your internet connection. The work flow of tickets submission either manually through the dashboard or mobile application, and tickets assignment to other agents along with tracking tickets and agents' performance is very easily executed with no issues being faced.
User Privileges : Teams, Trust Levels, Moderation, Private and Public Threads make it possible to have as much transparency, privacy or power decentralization as one wishes.
Gamification: Badges and Achievements can be customized for User Activity and frequent readers and writers.
Mailing List mode: Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.
Report features give the all insights of the customer team and customer support which enables us to make changes according to it.
The best thing about Zoho Desk is that it has a very beautiful and fully designed dashboard.
I have been using this software for a very long time in my organization, it is very easy to use with having the interface created on a very advanced module.
When utilizing as a ticketing system, it would be nice to have a better way to monitor when something is due. It's just a little cumbersome.
Search Functionality - The search functionality could use a tweak or two. Too many times I am unable to find tickets. This would also be very helpful for the "Recycle Bin" when you just need to find that ticket you accidentally deleted (we are all human!). :)
At times Zoho [Desk] can be a bit glitchy. It does not auto refresh on the ticketing system, and even f it tells you there is a new ticket clicking it does nothing and you need to refresh the page for it to work. We have found at times that is can become unresponsive, although this usually doesn't last for longer than 15-30 mins.
Zoho Desk has a technical team of professionals, who are well informed, and they know how to share the knowledge with the other players. Besides, they are competent in dealing with all kinds of customers, from divergent locations, and adopt their differences. Lastly, when called upon to solve an issue, they are quickly responsive.
Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.
We selected Zoho Desk as we needed a platform that was going to allow the business to grow through both usage and staffing numbers. We wanted something cost-effective but still offered standard features in an effective cloud-delivered solution but would still allow customization by our internal dev team, to derive better value from the service where it natively didn't do what we needed it to. FreeAgent was okay for a while, but Zoho Desk has allowed a vast improvement in our service offering to end customers.
Community Members are eager to jump into the discussion.
Conversations can be tracked easier without the risk of being lost in a sea of messages as people tend to construct their posts more carefully than on any workspace messenger.
It's open source and configurable with many other add-ons to help integration with other services.
Zoho Desk has created an organised sytem of support which alows me to help my customers more efficiently.
By saving resolutions as articles, Zoho Desk has provided a training resource for current customers and support staff as part of solving problems.
All new customers become part of a database of customers who continue to receive support and education from forums created by the articles and customer questions.
